About

My name is Tim Roadley and I’m a ‘married-with-child-self-professed-IT-nerd’. I do computer stuff for both work and play. I work for an Australian financial services company called Cuscal where I’ve gone through the ranks as Desktop Support, Server Support, Senior Server Support,Team Leader and now Infrastructure Manager. 11 years through and it is way too interesting to give up, even though heaps of people say that’s too long to be in one place. Cuscal have an enormous company changing project going on right now that is awesome to be immersed in every day, especially to have my name all over many design aspects.

A couple of years ago I released a public website called AskEarn.com. The idea of the site was to try to give back to people who help others on question forums. The way that was supposed to happen was for someone with an issue to put up a $10 bounty on a question (any topic). Whoever could solve that question to the askers satisfaction would receive $5 and the question solution would then be locked. Others could then pay $5 to unlock, split royalties from that going to the asker and solver. Unfortunately I had to shut down the site due to the expense of running a merchant account, which is required in Australia for accepting credit card payments online. While the site may not have been a great success it was a large driver for learning database and web site design from the ground up. AskEarn was essentially a custom-built forum with a secure payments section. The ‘from scratch’ sql web development I now re-use and customise for any purpose that presents itself.

One of the main beneficiaries of this new-found ASP/SQL coding has been my work. Our team now has a real-time portal we use every day. The job of our Infrastructure team is to ensure that all systems Cuscal runs are performing at their best. If issues occur, or are going to occur, we need to know ASAP so we can react. The portal not only has hooks into many databases for real-time information, it also has procedures, wiki, team contacts, a knowledge-base etc.

ASP/SQL coding is fun, however it’s got nothing on iOS coding. iOS is the operating system used on iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. The language is Objective-C, which is object oriented C code. By the way, you can still use normal C or C++ code in objective C if you like. I’ve been learning Objective-C for over a year now and have released an iPhone game ‘iHeals’ in that time. It’s certainly no Angry Birds that’s for sure! Regardless, as long as I’m having fun and learning at the same time I don’t see it as a waste of time at all.

More recently I’ve been delving into Box2D. What is Box2d you ask? It’s the reason Angry Birds is so awesome – physics. Now box2d is written in C++ code so to start mucking around with it I had to write a ‘wrapper’ for it. I’ll explain that in a how-to one day. Hopefully someone points me to a wrapper someone has already written, I can’t help but feel I’m re-inventing the wheel. (EDIT: I am, it’s called CCBox2D, that”s now on the to do list to look in to).

Anyway I think that’s enough for my ‘About Me’ post. Now it’s time to get on to some proper articles.

Thanks for reading

Tim

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34 Responses to About

nice blog ;-)
Do you want to get a free license for my TexturePacker and PhyscisEditor?
If so just contact me at support@code-and-web.de and send me your real name and postal address. I’ll create a free license for you.

Well I just discovered your blog today(13Nov2011) and One word that I will tell for everyone , “it is really simple to understand for the people who do not have a non programing background and English is not the native language.” Well Done Tim.

I am trying to make an app that has an rss feed and can display data from a website. The website has php so the data can be generated in almost any format. I am new to the whole iOS thing and have been struggling through some tutorials and found yours to be the best so I was wondering if you had any good pointers.

Hi Tim!
I really like your tutorials and they are really helping me out but I have one request! Could you please upload a tutorial which includes implementing sections, with delete support? Please could you make a tutorial, I really need it!
Thanks

Hi, I’ve read all your articles about this core data project. I am very happy because you teach me some more interesting techs. So I learned carefully and I bought your iSoccer app for thanks.

I found your code has a serious question, that you double – defined a fetchResultsController in many ViewController. For example, the PersonsTVC. PersonsTVC has already had an fetchResultsController from its super Class: CoreDataTableViewController.

So in your code, you defined two fetchResultsController, one is linked with PersonsTVC, one is linked with CoreDataTableViewController. So the problem is, when you set a fetchResultsController in PersonsTVC -setupFetchResultsController method, (self.fetchResultsController = …), you just set it to PersonsTVC. the CoreDataTableViewController will not receive the new fetcherResultsController setter message.

Then, the fetchResultController you set in PersonsTVC, will have no delegate. So you must use [self performFetch] to update the tableView.

THE SOLUTION IS: delete @property and @synthesize of fetchResultController in PersonsTVC, and all [self performFetch] in PersonsTVC.

I bought iSoccer and I have to say its so amusing when playing multiplayer. The only issue I discovered is that sometimes when you pause the game or you exit the app (by tapping the home button), one of the players freezes, leaving one user with only one player available to move throughout the screen while the other one sits steady. Some times the glitch goes away after a while, but thats not always the case.

Hi Tim, Gig Fan of your site… I need some help displaying search results in a app Im creating. Could you help me when you have some spare time? After clicking on the search results its displaying the wrong detail view. Thanks again.

I really enjoyed your Core Data tutorial and I will be interested in a tutorial on how to store big images using Core Data. I’ve tried several approaches but none gave me the confidence I need. Please consider sharing your expertise with us.

The blog is excellent and I have been following the core data tutorials. I want to modify it a little in my project and I am running into an issue. Where you are creating the role detail I want to put a tab view controller there. The issue I am running into is with the segue part of the code I don’t know how to write that because the previous segue movement refers to core data information but all I want to do is show the tabs. Thanks a lot if you can help!

The second pass I’m doing on the book now for iOS 7 is almost done. I’m looking forward to ‘Xcode Automatic Configuration’ coming back online so I can finalise the iCloud chapters. The first half of the book has been submitted to production and the last half is due very soon. The Apple dev site being down has slowed things down unfortunately.

Hello,
Let me introduce myself, my name is Diego Caridei and I’m the administrator of the blog iProg.it, The following is community programming topics (Obj-C, Java, C / C + +, Python, VB, PHP, etc.) and a few months ago we opened a new section concerning the review of manuals. If that’s okay we want to review your manual (iOS Core Animation : Advanced Techniques). Upon confirmation please send few chapters of reference or a copy of the text.
Regards
Diego Caridei

Thanks for the great book!! I am trying to go through your tutorials, but if I attempt to access your site on any PC web browsers (and I have tested on a few different devices) your site won’t open and alerts pop up saying a threat has been removed (Exploit Blackhat SEO type 1720). I can, however, access your site on my mac. Just wanted you to be aware!

Wrapper for C++? Why? I use C++ in my iOS app as is. Add your *.h and *cpp to your project. To use the functions in your .cpp file in an Object C class, just name that implementation file with *.mm instead of *.m. #include the C++ .h file in your .mm file and away you go. The .mm extension tells Xcode to run that file through the C++ compeller. The class using the .cpp code is normally non-UI and inherits only from NSObject. Also need to #import . I use these class with the .mm extension as data classes for my UI. Example a custom UIViewController class can #import the companion .h of the .mm file.

BTW: I am currently learning CoreData with your book. This book is AWESOME!!! Thanks!

HI Tim , really enjoyed the Staff Manager tutorial and learnt a lot about core data from it.
I am trying to add a view controller before the tab bar controller as a sort of front end controller that will be able to access the table views but whatever i try it crashes out.
Any pointers would be fantastic..
thanks again
clive

I have read your book on core data and built my own version of GroceryDude app. I am pleased with your book. you covered most of the important use cases. However, I feel there is one part which could be very more valuable to add in next edition. i.e Encryption using core data.
There are many ways to approach this but I would like to know your thoughts on that. Also, apple introduced NSIncrementalStore in iOS 5. If you could highlight about its uses that would be very useful to everyone.